Over 400 people were arrested in Russia as they paid tribute to opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony, a prominent human rights group reported on Sunday.
The sudden death of 47-year-old Navalny was a blow to many Russians who had pinned their hopes for the future on President Vladimir Putin's fiercest enemy. Navalny remained consistent with his relentless criticism of the Kremlin even after surviving nerve agent poisoning and receiving multiple prison sentences.
The news reverberated around the world, with many world leaders blaming President Vladimir Putin and his government for the death. In an exchange with reporters shortly after leaving a church service on Saturday, President Joe Biden reiterated his stance that Putin was ultimately responsible for Navalny's death. “The fact is that Putin is responsible for this. Regardless of whether he ordered it, he is responsible for the circumstance,” Biden said. “It’s a reflection of who he is. This cannot be tolerated.”
Meanwhile, Navalny's wife Yulia Navalnaya posted a picture of the couple on Instagram on Sunday in her first social media post since her husband's death. The caption read simply: “I love you.” Hundreds of people in dozens of Russian cities flocked to ad hoc memorials and monuments to victims of political repression on Friday and Saturday with flowers and candles to honor the politician. According to human rights group OVD-Info, which tracks political arrests and provides legal assistance, police had arrested 401 people in over a dozen cities as of Saturday evening.
According to the group, there were more than 200 arrests in St. Petersburg, Russia's second largest city. Among those detained there was Grigory Mikhnov-Voitenko, a priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church – a religious group independent of the Russian Orthodox Church – who announced plans on social media to hold a memorial service for Navalny and outside his home on Saturday morning was arrested. He was accused of organizing a rally and was placed in a holding cell at a police station, but was later hospitalized with a stroke, OVD-Info reported.
Courts in St. Petersburg sentenced 42 of those detained Friday to prison terms of between one and six days, while nine others were fined, court officials said late Saturday. According to OVD Info, at least six people were sentenced to 15 days in prison in Moscow. One person was also detained in the southern city of Krasnodar and two others in the city of Bryansk, the group said.
News of Navalny's death came a month before Russia's presidential election, which is widely expected to give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.
Questions remained about the cause of death and it remained unclear when authorities would release Navalny's body. More than 12,000 people have submitted a request to the Russian government to hand over the politician's remains to his relatives, OVD-Info said on Sunday.
Navalny's team said on Saturday the politician had been “murdered” and accused authorities of deliberately delaying the release of the body, with Navalny's mother and lawyers receiving conflicting information from various institutions where they went to search for the body . “They are driving us in circles and covering their tracks,” Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysch said on Saturday.
“Everything in the colony is covered in cameras. His every move has been filmed from every angle over the years. Every employee has a video recorder. Within two days, not a single video was leaked or published. There is no room for uncertainty here,” Navalny’s closest ally and strategist Leonid Volkov said on Sunday.
A note given to Navalny's mother said he died at 2:17 p.m. on Friday, according to Yarmysh. Prison officials told his mother when she arrived at the penal colony on Saturday that her son had died of “sudden death syndrome,” Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny's anti-corruption foundation, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service reported that Navalny felt sick and fell unconscious after a walk on Friday in the penal colony in the town of Charp in the Yamal-Nenets region, about 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow. An ambulance arrived but he could not be revived, the service said, adding that the cause of death was still being “determined”.
Navalny had been detained since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recovering in Germany from a nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. Since his arrest, he has been sentenced to three prison terms, denying several allegations as politically motivated.
After the latest verdict, which gave him a 19-year prison sentence, Navalny said he understood that he was “serving a life sentence measured by the length of my life or the lifespan of this regime.”
Just a few hours after the news of Navalny's death, his wife Yulia Navalnaya made a dramatic appearance at the Munich Security Conference.
She said she wasn't sure whether she could believe the news from official Russian sources, “but if this is true, I want Putin and everyone around Putin, Putin's friends, his government, to know that they are responsible for bear what they did to our country, to my family and to my husband.”